In September, Buddy Valastro suffered an injury to his dominant right hand following a freak accident at his home bowling alley. Since then, the baker has been sharing his journey toward rehabilitation and a new "Road to Recovery" TLC special shared exclusive footage of his return to the kitchen.
A short clip posted on TLC's YouTube channel shows Buddy carving and icing a cake at Carlo's Bakery, where he explained how difficult it has been to acknowledge how his abilities in the kitchen have changed since the accident: "I'm not the kind of guy that just wants to design it and engineer it [the cake]. I want to touch it and I want to feel it," he said. "I want to be in the game, I don't want to be on the sidelines watching."
The video showed Buddy attempting to carve what appears to be a yellow sheet cake but he has trouble keeping the knife steady in his hand. "I can't hold the knife. I can't squeeze my thumb to keep the knife in place," he said, explaining he has only regained about 15 percent of his hand strength back.
This particular dessert was made with fudge rather than icing, making the topping a bit thicker and harder to spread. When it came time to ice the cake, Buddy clearly struggled to spread the topping as fast as he was used to. "It's kind of like an old boxer who thinks that he can still fight, ya know?" Buddy said in a confessional interview included in the clip.
"In the back of his mind he knows that he can't do it," Buddy's Cake Boss co-star Mauro Castano said. "He ain't moving like Buddy Valastro does."
